Lafayette General Medical Center Recognized for Patient Safety – 2016

Lafayette General Medical Center (LGMC) has received the 2016 Women’s Choice Award® as one of America’s Best Hospitals for Patient Safety. This evidence-based distinction is the only patient safety award that identifies the country’s best hospitals based on robust criteria that considers female patient satisfaction and clinical excellence.

“We continuously strive to have zero hospital-acquired infections,” says Patrick W. Gandy, Jr., CEO of LGMC. “We must always get better in our care delivery process, and we have improved. So, it’s an honor for our staff to be recognized for creating one of the safest environments among hospitals nationwide.”

The list of award-winning hospitals, including LGMC, represents hospitals that have exceptional performance in limiting a wide range of hospital-associated infections and complications from surgery and medical treatment.

Hospitals that earn this award have a low incidence of problems arising from surgical errors and infections. The hospitals that report their frequency to The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) are ranked for each of the following 11 measures:

1. Deaths among patients with serious treatable complications after surgery,
2. Collapsed lung due to medical treatment,
3. Serious blood clots after surgery,
4. A wound that splits open after surgery on the abdomen or pelvis,
5. Accidental cuts and tears from medical treatment,
6. Serious complications,
7. Central line-associated blood stream infections (CLABSI),
8. Catheter-Associated Urinary Tract Infections (CAUTI),
9. Surgical Site Infection from colon surgery (SSI: Colon),
10. Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus Aureus (MRSA) blood laboratory-identified events (bloodstream infections), and 
11. Clostridium difficile (C.diff.) laboratory-identified events (intestinal infections).

Hospitals are eliminated from consideration for the following:
• Not reporting on at least 4 of the surgical complication measures (1-6) or 4 of the infection measures (7-11),
• Having a patient recommendation rating in the bottom 25% nationally,
• Receiving a CMS rating of “Worse than the U.S. National Rate” for any of the above measures
• Not implementing Safe Surgery Checklists.

“We honor LGMC for being named and recognized as a hospital of choice among women, for it represents the strongest and most important consumer message in today’s healthcare marketplace when considering that women account for 90% of all health care decisions,” says Delia Passi, Founder and CEO of the Women’s Choice Award. “Improving patient safety is not only a matter of error prevention, it’s a focused effort to create the safest patient experience.”

For more information on the 2016 America’s Best Hospitals for Patient Safety click here.